A DAY WITH
PRESIDENT KENNEDY
(MARCH 16, 1961)


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Here's how a New Jersey newspaper covered
the same story, complete with a few pictures
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3/16/61 PHOTOS
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JFK ASSASSINATION ARGUMENTS
(PART 1343)


NICHOLAS R. NALLI SAID:

The forward head snap [of President Kennedy's head at Zapruder Film frame #313] was discovered prior to [Josiah] Thompson and is clearly observable to anyone with the still frames. .... But Thompson would find a way around the “impasse” of the Z312–Z313 forward head snap from a systems analyst by the name of David Wimp, who presented his unusual takes on the Zapruder Film as early as 2002.

Referencing Wimp, Thompson proposes that what we observe in the Z312–Z313 frames is merely an “illusion” brought on by the blurring of the image evident in frame Z313. Thompson asks, “Why didn’t I think of this?” and makes odd claims that it’s “elementary” and “so obvious and so simple.”

I say “odd” because, first of all, the notion that a blurred frame in a movie film could create the illusion of motion when there was none is anything but “obvious” — indeed, if it were so “elementary” then why hadn’t anyone else “thought of it” as well? This not only includes Thompson (who’s no dummy), but also his student assistant Bill Hoffman (one of “the best” students in the Haverford physics department), two Nobel Prize winning physicists (Prof. Richard Feynman and Prof. Luis Alvarez), Francis Corbett and his team at Itek Corporation, Kodak film expert Roland Zavada, Ken Rahn, Robert Groden, David Lifton, Gerald Posner, Larry Sturdivan, me, and practically every other researcher who has studied the still frames, WC critic and apologist alike.

[...]

When I first heard about the “blur illusion” in 2018, I had hoped that Thompson would come to his senses and not publish this spurious material (and I had hoped that I wouldn’t have had to go through this). But ultimately, much like the “acoustics evidence,” my attendant study of the Zapruder camera and Kodachrome II film ended up becoming an interesting academic pursuit in its own right. The results confirm the stark reality of a sudden, 5 cm (2 in) forward motion of the President’s head from Z312 to Z313, reinforcing the fact that President Kennedy was shot in the head from behind.

Should the reader have any lingering doubt (perhaps they trust “common sense” more than the technical mumbo-jumbo of another scientist), then they need not worry. They may simply see for themselves that the Z312 blurring causes no “illusion” of isolated forward motion on JFK’s head, and JFK’s head still snaps forward in the same manner as before [see the animated Zapruder Film GIF clip presented below].




DAVID WIMP SAID:

Back when I made my measurements of JFK's head movement somewhere around the turn of the century, a programming error resulted in 0 head movement between 312 and 313. Since it appeared that JFK did move forward contrary to the measurements, I thought it must be some sort of illusion. I corrected that error shortly after that and got a result of about one inch. Somehow, that initial statement drowned out the thousand times after that where I said his head moved about one inch or, more correctly, the intersection of the head and curb moved forward about one inch.

That I have a “blur illusion” hypothesis is the result mostly of people failing to distinguish between what people are saying and what people are saying people are saying which seems to be a pervasive problem.

The issue is not about illusions but rather about bad methodology. The reflection from the handholds on the bubble top frame, commonly called the roll bar, are about two inches wider in 313 than they are in 312. This is actually due to a rotation of the camera but at the distance of the limo, it amounts to about 2 inches. That means a measurement of the head from the left side of the handholds will show about two more inches of movement than if the measurement is made from the right side.

My contention is that the correct measurement is from the right side, so a measurement from the left side is two inches high. An average of the two or, equivalently, a measurement from the middle will be one inch high and that's about the difference between my result and Thompson's and Itek's.

The intersection of the head and curb is about the only thing that can be measured with any accuracy, but what the measurement actually represents is not really clear. That measurement only serves as a reasonable proxy for the actual head motion under the assumption that the head is moving in the plane of the camera, but that is just an assumption.


DAVID VON PEIN SAID:

In the final analysis, regardless of how President Kennedy's head moved after he was shot, the reality/fact of the matter is this (and always has been this): JFK was shot in the head just once and that bullet came from behind him.

The above irrevocable fact is proven by way of the autopsy photos and X-rays and the autopsy report. The 17 pathologists who either examined the original autopsy photos or had their hands on the dead President at Bethesda Naval Hospital on 11/22/63 all came to that same conclusion—i.e., JFK was shot in the head only once, with that shot coming from behind him.

Conspiracy theorists have attempted to explain away the Zapruder Film and the autopsy photographs and the autopsy X-rays and the conclusions reached by Drs. Humes, Boswell, and Finck in the autopsy report ("...it is our opinion that the deceased died as a result of two perforating gunshot wounds...fired from a point behind and somewhat above the level of the deceased" [From Page 6 of JFK's Official Autopsy Report; Warren Report, Page 543]).

Many conspiracy believers continue to pretend that the autopsy photos and X-rays are fakes and that the autopsy doctors wrote and signed a deliberately false report which is filled with a bunch of lies (including the excerpt I just quoted above). But are such beliefs truly reasonable ones? I don't think they are. They aren't even close to reasonable, in my opinion.

Isn't nearly six decades of non-stop conspiracy fantasy talk coming from the mouths (and the books) of conspiracy theorists more than enough? I certainly think so.

David Von Pein
June 7, 2021


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